China's geoeconomic strategy: what power shift to China?

That economic and fi nancial power is shifting from West to East – and specifically to China – has become a mantra of our age, repeated so often and so insistently that it appears to be widely regarded as self-evident. Frequently, it is accompanied by the assertion China is set irreversibly on the path to global pre-eminence, if not outright domination. It is only a matter of time, it is sometimes suggested, before China rules the world

The Walcheren Causeway Revisited

On a secluded plot of land reclaimed from the sea, the grateful Dutch people of Zealand have erected a monument dedicated to the 135 soldiers of the Fifth Brigade, Second Canadian Infantry Division killed or wounded in the battle of the Walcheren causeway, October 31st to November 2nd, 1944. The monument, unveiled by His Royal Highness Prince Bernard, of the Netherlands, on October 31st, 1987, in the presence of a handful of Canadian veterans, commemorates the sacrifice of the members of three regiments: The Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada, Le Régiment de Maisonneuve, both Montreal units, and the Calgary Highlanders. In order to appreciate the horrendous situation that the attacking infantrymen faced, one has to visualize the battle ground, a setting most likely unique for Canadian forces in the Second World War

Mapping String States into Partons: Form Factors and the Hadron Spectrum in AdS/QCD

New developments in holographic QCD are described in this talk in the context of the correspondence between string states in AdS and light-front wavefunctions of hadronic states in physical space-time.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures. Presented at Seventh Workshop on Continuous Advances in QCD, Minneapolis, May 11-14, 200

Dictionary writing system (DWS) plus corpus query package (CQP): the case of TshwaneLex

In this article the integrated corpus query functionality of the dictionary compilation software TshwanelLex is analysed. Attention is given to the handling of both raw corpus data and annotated corpus data. With regard to the latter it is shown how, with a minimum of human effort, machine learning techniques can be employed to obtain part-of-speech tagged corpora that can be used for lexicographic purposes. All points are illustrated with data drawn from English and Northern Sotho. The tools and techniques themselves, however, are language-independent, and as Such the encouraging outcomes of this study are far-reaching

Veal calf industry economics

This paper provides an outline of the veal industry, its standing relative to other cattle farming enterprises, and its future prospects. In 2008 some 20 per cent of bovines slaughtered in the EU were for veal production and about one-third of them were dairy calves. France, the Netherlands and Italy were Europe’s leading producers. Veal consumption in the European Union has been in steady decline since 1970. In 2008, it averaged 1.6 kg per capita, with France and Italy being the largest consumers. Despite variations in farming systems and carcass characteristics from one country to another, veal production is an important outlet for milk replacer producers and provides a market for their industrial dairy products. Regular changes in production factors such as the price of 8-day-old calves and milk replacers and their availability engender recurrent output fluctuations. Veal calf production plays a major part in regulating the milk and bovine-meat markets: it has largely contributed to stemming dairy (and sometimes meat) surpluses. However, the context has changed since 2008 with no more surplus milk supply and reduced EU-support for incorporating skimmed milk powder into milk feeds. Therefore, the relative attractiveness of other productions using 8-day-old calves and the support policies for cattle farming as a whole will affect the future of the veal calf industry

Combining quantifications for flexible query result ranking

Databases contain data and database systems governing such databases are often intended to allow a user to query these data. On one hand, these data may be subject to imperfections, on the other hand, users may employ imperfect query preference specifications to query such databases. All of these imperfections lead to each query answer being accompanied by a collection of quantifications indicating how well (part of) a group of data complies with (part of) the user's query. A fundamental question is how to present the user with the query answers complying best to his or her query preferences. The work presented in this paper first determines the difficulties to overcome in reaching such presentation. Mainly, a useful presentation needs the ranking of the query answers based on the aforementioned quantifications, but it seems advisable to not combine quantifications with different interpretations. Thus, the work presented in this paper continues to introduce and examine a novel technique to determine a query answer ranking. Finally, a few aspects of this technique, among which its computational efficiency, are discussed